In a typical data warehouse environment large amounts of data are periodically rolled into tables. In the case of new data being rolled into a table, before the new data can be accessible to a general user of the table, integrity processing (e.g. constraint checking, index maintenance, and materialized view maintenance) must be preformed on the new data. It is desirable that existing data in the table remain fully on-line and available to the general user while integrity processing is performed on the rolled in data. Existing methods typically either bring the entire table off-line or bring the table on-line in a read-only mode while the integrity processing of the rolled in data is carried out.
Also, as the volume of data being rolled into the table can be significant, existing systems, which typically integrity process the rolled-in data all at once, can create significant delays before any of the rolled-in data is made available to the general user.
What is needed is a mechanism to permit full on-line access to a table while integrity processing of rolled in data is deferred to a later time and carried out on an incremental basis. Preferably the integrity processed rolled-in data can be made available (on-line accessible) gradually as processing of each increment of data is completed.